


housekeeping

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Gen, post-msiv
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-18
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-24 19:20:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14361954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: The porch lights are on. That’s the first thing he notices.





	1. in spring

Eventually, he runs out of clean clothes.

It’s stupid really. He is terrible at doing his laundry. Terrible at sitting in the warm orange plastic chairs at the laundromat, all fluorescent, the doughy scent of warm sheets burning like smoke. Terrible at paying the knock-off Zoltar with spare change and pocket lint and waiting to feel big.

Last time he went, he turned his last white shirt red. Last time he went, the penny prophet told him it was out of fortunes. Come again later. He’s gotten good at taking invitations to say as warnings to go. Come again later. He didn’t.

Plus, the Bay stays cold and gets colder. He’s been hanging around Chesapeake for a month or two. Living in the sea air, the salt, because nothing else does. March brought the freeze and April held it between its dull teeth, wrung it out into a humid little spring.

For a while, he’d considered California. He’s never seen it. But its far from the coast he’s been circling, and it turns out a couple thousand is only a lot of money if you’re buying video games, or had a Bar Mitzvah, or are seventeen and stupid and so alone that your girlfriend thinking you’re cool, fanning bills, sounds like salvation. It’s only a lot of money if someone else is keeping you alive. He’s worn into his last pair of jeans. Stealing is easy but exhausting. Everything he owns smells like dust and brine.

So. He’s never really had a lot of options. He just liked to think so. It’s not like murder is really a marketable skill. At one shit motel, he gives his name as Henry Hill. At another, Bickle. Durden. And when he’s not feeling like a complete asshat: Luke Skywalker. No one ever blinks. Anonymity clings; he curls up in it.

Mid-April. He drives one last stolen car with a hand out the window, and as he moves into Virginia the air stops smelling like the Bay’s primordial preserves.

It takes him three miles past the state lines to realize the new smell is dirt and rain. The dead come alive. In spring, things rise again. Glory, glory, hallelujah.

The radio plays static and snatches of song.

—

The porch lights are on. That’s the first thing he notices.

—

Mostly, he is afraid she is going to cry. He knows she’s pregnant. It doesn’t bother him. Why should it bother him? People get pregnant. Pregnant women cry. For some reason, even though he’d heard it — choking, somehow dry tears, more than once — she doesn’t seem like the type.

At a gas station he stops at when he hits empty circling Farrs Corner for the eighth hour, he stares at the wall of Hallmark for a long time.  _Congratulations! It’s a girl!_

It is a girl. He knows that.

Another marketable skill: human sonogram. Long-range.

And another thing he knows: Ginger — Scully, Dana, whoever —is terrified, but that she loves her, the baby. Desperately.

Already, he thinks. Already.

He doesn’t buy anything but a pack of cigarettes. He throws them out the window before he turns down the long dirt drive.

—

He’d woken up underwater with a killer fucking headache. It was dark without context - so that he was blinking without knowing if his eyes ever opened. So cold it was warm. He surfaced only to duck back down out of the reflections on the water.

And he could hear her the whole time: _It’s alright. You can go. We won’t follow you._

He’d been raised vaguely Presbyterian, but he recognized a baptism when he saw one. Under again and down, down.

—

She doesn’t cry. She looks unsurprised, glassy-eyed, pleased; she watches him from the doorway with a hint of flinty little something he thinks might be love. She’d known he was coming. Mulder doesn’t try to hug him again, but he breathes in sharply behind her at the door, squeezing her shoulder. Jackson knows how it feels to take a bullet in the man’s body, but he can’t imagine having a thing to say to him. To either of them, really.

For a moment, he thinks they’re not going to let him in.

He shifts. “Uh, hi.”

She -  he’s gotta have something to call her besides a generalized pronoun. Dana feels too close. He knows Mulder calls her Scully, but he doesn’t know her like that. Mom is pretty much out of the question.

As a kid, when he could see her, she’d been Ginger. Avenging abandoner. It doesn’t fit so much as apply.

So. Ginger puts her hand over her stomach, just for a second. He knows it was unconscious because he knew she was going to do it before she did.

She says, “Hi.”

Mulder says, “Oh my god.”

Jackson says nothing.

Mulder squeezes her again, a little harder, drawing her back into the doorway. She narrows her eyes at some vague point beyond Jackson’s head, then refocuses on him.

“I don’t wanna be rude,” he says. “But it’s…it’s pretty fucking cold out here for April.”

“Of course,” Ginger says, pulling the door open wider. Mulder is nodding hard behind her, backing up to let him in. “Oh,” - for the first time since the morgue, he hears her get caught up on or in something unexpected. There is an audible hitch. “ _Of course.”_

—

He remembers the water in Richmond. Not clean so much as empty. All the hard freedom of a cold space.  

—

The house reminds him of his backyard fortress as a kid, back when they were still in Wyoming. All that quiet space and grass. Maybe Virginia was where it got bad. When everything started to close in.

Anyways. The fortress, slanted. Makeshift but sturdy, all solid hardwood and displacement. A sense of private certitude; a make-believe game gone on so long it feels real. There are books on the stairs in the house, a fish tank on the kitchen table, empty and taking up half the space. The lights are dim and warm. He walks very lightly, as if on hallowed ground.

Mulder reaches out for him, just for a second, after he makes it past the threshold. Russian folklore said that house spirits lived in those threshold spaces, under doorways. Domovois. He’s gone Wikipedia diving a few times in his life. He knows they are waiting to be unhomed. He does not know why he thinks of it. 

Mulder touches above his elbow, squeezed gently. Jackson is a fuck up, but he is not unkind. He leans in a little and lets him.

“God. You look like your mother,” he says, red-eyed and blinking. He opens his mouth for a moment and then closes his eyes. Ginger touches just above his hip and Mulder shakes his head sharply, moving away from her. “Excuse me a second.”

 _Dad never cried,_  Jackson thinks, remembering his sober, farm roots father, steady even in the suburbs of Norfolks. His calloused hands.  _Dad never cried._ The words are all so much fucking nonsense in this context it almost makes him sick.

He hears Mulder go upstairs, busying himself taking off his jacket. He feels something roll and rock in Ginger. It’s physical, but it isn’t the baby. His head pounds for a moment and he winces, turning away to busy with the empty little fish tank.

“Make your - “ He hears her swallow. “You can sit wherever you like. I’ll be right back. We’ll find something to eat.”

In the fishtanks, there is no water. Just pebbles dyed an unnatural blue, a turned over plant. It looks vaguely dusty. Old.

Upstairs, he can hear them fighting. He feels twelve. He feels afraid. He feels  _my parents never fought_ and he feels his fifth-grade classroom and his best friend fisting his eyes at lunch and the word  _divorce_. He feels very small and strange, one story below them and choking on a rebellious little self-reliance so powerful it comes out almost the same as need.

Mulder’s voice carries: “You knew,” he’s saying, loud. “You knew, Scully, and you didn’t fucking tell me. You let me think - “

His voice breaks off into tears. He can’t hear Ginger even though he knows she’s speaking. For the first time in a while, he doesn’t try to. The mugs shake on their low wood shelves, and he regulates his breathing until they still. Domovis were spurred to action by familial discontent. They pinched and poltergeisted. They broke the thing and then crept around, frustrated that no one would fix it.

He would leave. But he really is out of laundry and quarters. He sits down hard at the kitchen table, staring at his wavering, thin reflection in the fish tank. This was a weird idea to have, he decides. Upstairs is quiet now. He closes his eyes to listen for Ginger, then changes his mind. She’s not far away. When she wants him to listen, he thinks she’ll talk.

—

In the seventh grade, he and his best friend Molly had built a shortwave radio in their science classroom during a series of lunch periods. It worked at about a forty foot radius, but he could always hear her anyway. Even when he wasn’t hearing anything but static on the radio, from somewhere he was hearing Molly.

It wasn’t voices, per se. He didn’t see dead people. Often.

But when his mom was in a car accident when he was nine, he felt it in his knees and spine. In the back of his head and behind his eyes.

He calls it the Dial-In, sometimes, because that’s what it feels like. It is a fractional, unreasonable science. Molly moved across the country and he could hear her crystal clear for a year, and then he met Grant and Lucas and he hasn’t heard her since. He cannot hear Mulder.

Just think of it like this: Everyone broadcasts a signal, but he’s the only one picking up channels. And he can change them, if he wants. He used to be able to make Molly see giraffes on the playground.

Also, he is the only one.

Or. Maybe not.

Because - see - it’s not that he wants her to be his mom or something, not really. He doesn’t even need her to love him, although he knows she does, in an obscure, neurological way that only a psychic little shit could.

It’s just. It just that - until Ginger - no one had ever heard him back.

—

When she comes downstairs again, there are spots of red high up on her cheekbones like she’s been crying, but her eyes are bright and clear. He gets the sense that they don’t really have to say anything to each other, and it feels kind of good. Like the gentle static from Molly’s end of the radio. Like this won’t have to be nearly as complicated as he’d thought it would be.

“I ran out of clothes,” he says.

“I know.”

“You guys probably have a washing machine.”

“We do.”

She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t not smile, either. She sits down carefully across from him. The tank obscures just a quarter of her sharp face. The silence is long but not uncomfortable. Her eyes are serious and careful, cataloging him. When she reaches out, it is only for a moment, and only to lay her fingers gently over his wrist on the table. Her touch is cold, familiar but only in the way every doctor’s hands feel both gentle and dangerous, feel the same. She doesn’t really look like anybody’s mother.

Her fingers press gently over blue veins. He thinks she is taking his pulse. Her thumb swipes over his wrist once, twice, and she lets him go.

Something about the lack of her touch makes him go a little limp, even though the initial contact had made him tense. “So. He doesn’t like me,” he says suddenly. Where the fuck had that - ? He kicks his sneaker off the leg of the table and feels absolutely prepubescent, flushing.

She rolls her eyes. She rolls her fucking eyes at him. He doesn’t even know her. A little, younger part of him, feels sharply betrayed, but just for a breath or so. Her hand comes back to his wrist, squeezes.

“He loves you,” she says, and it doesn’t sound like an excuse. “It’s…it’s too much for him, sometimes.”

It doesn’t sound like an apology either.

“And he’s angry with me,” she amends. “Not you. And I think he feels a little bit left out. I knew you were coming. I knew you were - “ She swallows. “He didn’t.”

He wants to ask her - the big fucking question, the one he cannot parse out no matter how many dials he turns in her head, he wants to know if his life is really gonna go like a  _Star Wars_ sequel - but he doesn’t.

“Well.” He picks at his cuticle. “Is he ever gonna say not weird shit to me?”

“Probably not.” She shrugs. “You’ll learn to live with it.”

He is not going to stay. He knows she knows that. His parents never let him sleep outside in the fort, but it was enough to know it was there. Its open roof and shifting walls. It was enough to be able to see it from his window.

“What’s with the tank?” He kicks back a little in the chair, falsely comfortable. It seems a fitting project for two Feds who just lost their jobs, but an odd one for parents-to-be.

Ginger looks at the empty tank like she hadn’t noticed it there before. She touches a finger to its warped, cloudy glass.

Quietly, she says, “I guess we’re just trying to keep something alive.”

—

The day is a little longer than he’d hoped it would be, shadows pulling and drawing on the walls. She makes hot tea and pours him a glass of too cold water. He would say she putters around the kitchen, but that’s not it at all. She is precise, methodical, even when she sits back down. If he didn’t know she was pregnant, you really couldn’t tell. He doesn’t think about it. Mulder stays upstairs. Outside, the night finally goes the thin, forgiving dark of just after Daylight Savings.

“Why don’t you go shower while I make something to eat? I’ll show you the guest bathroom.” Her voice is clipped and gentle. “There are clean towels.”

The way she looks at him, with a kind of measured fierceness, a quiet love, a holdout terror. Something shifted for her, he can feel it, when he asked to be let go and she found that she could do it, if she had to. She loves him, he knows - he wasn’t fucking with her. But he thinks maybe she is through being sorry - is that it? That she’s through being anything but there, right there, with him in the kitchen of her old house, waiting to use up two loads of detergent and all the hot water?

When he dials in to her, just for a moment, he sees warmth and clear, hard edges. She cleaves. In both senses of the word. They both do. She blinks slowly at him.

“And then,” she adds lightly, pushing away from the table. “You are grounded until you are thirty-seven.”

She looks back at him for a moment, moving towards the stove, and he gets a smile so sharp and sudden he swallows the water she’d put in front of him cold down into his chest. He never could open up, but he’s seen her peel back ribs. She just cuts right through.

He and Ginger. He thinks they’ll get along just fine.

—

They have a guest bedroom, but he stays for two nights on the couch, that first time.

The first night, he wanders out of the bathroom with wet hair in a pair of Mulder’s sweatpants and a worn UMD t-shirt that he embarrassingly thinks might be hers. It fits soft and comfortable over his skinny chest.

The first night, she looks stricken when he reappears in the kitchen, gripping the edge of the counter. He’s never actually seen someone look like they’d seen a ghost before; he smiles but it doesn’t seem to help.

“Sorry,” she says, shaking her hands, freeing the counter. “You just surprised me. You look like…”

There is no use in her trailing off like this when he can just tune into her station. She closes her eyes, and he sees Mulder, younger, his hair dripping long over his forehead under a hard rain.

The first night, she actually asks if she can hug him, which he doesn’t think any adult has ever done before. He’s so caught off guard by it he almost says no, just lets it trip off his tongue, but doesn’t. When he nods, she wraps her arms around him, and his chin brushes the top of her head.

He thinks she’d kind of like to stay, to sleep in front of the door like a watchdog, but she doesn’t and he’s glad. And she doesn’t call him anything, when she goes upstairs, just says, “Goodnight,” sounds choked again.  It’s not really that he expected her to call him Jackson, and he thinks it’s better than being called by a name he’s never known, but it leaves him feeling curiously abandoned, somehow.

The couch is more comfortable than any number of motel beds, but the quiet around the house is the same.

—

And in the morning, Ginger is gone and Jackson is almost surprised to find he has stayed, not gone somnambulist on himself. Running errands, Mulder says by way of greeting and explanation. He looks better than the night before, resigned, not unhappily so. He is sitting at the kitchen table when Jackson wakes up, and he puts out another mug of coffee like a quaint little truce. If he tried, Jackson could peer in at Ginger, even at this range, and find out how they’d managed to quickly patch up the big thing he’d felt tear last night. He doesn’t.

The tank is gone, moved somewhere out of sight. Sitting across the table, he can see Mulder head on, without interruption. He looks at him for a long time without saying anything, then shakes his head, smiles.

“Faking your death has gotta be easier when you can make people see whatever you want, huh?” There is a wry lilt to his voice. It is, objectively, the least weird thing the man has said to him since the motel, and it still makes Jackson choke on the coffee.

“Uh. Easier than what?”

Mulder raises his eyebrows. “Than having to fake a gunshot wound to the head with only a very unlucky would-be assassin in your apartment and a very good liar of a partner in your back pocket.”

He waits for Jackson to finish his sip of coffee before continuing.

“The way I see it is there are only a couple of good reasons to fake your death. Either you’re looking for something,” he rubs his eyes. “Or you really, really don’t want to be found.”

“Or both,” Jackson offers.

Mulder smiles. For a second, Jackson feels a give somewhere, behind his right eye. It’s gone as quick as it came. “Or both,” Mulder says.

That is essentially how the day begins, after that first night. That is essentially how it goes and goes.

—

At summer camp, the years he went before the incident with the lake and Benny McPherson kept him from going back, all the boys in Tent 12 used to bond like soldiers in wartime. A fierce, impersonal kind of love that was founded on displaying their splinters and scars under curious flashlight beams.

This is not that, exactly, but Ginger is gone all day, and Mulder, whoever the fuck Mulder is to him, has seen some shit. More than Jackson could dig up on Wikipedia. Also, out of nowhere, there is a dog in the house, nipping at their ankles, so they walk him in long laps around the boundless property.

Mulder is telling him about Africa, second-hand, and not about psych wards. About a little boy named Gibson. About a God Module, and brain surgery and Scully, but it’s less of an education and more of an _I’ll show you mine if you show me yours_. He is tempted. He  _likes_  him. Mostly, he likes that Mulder talks about it (the morpheme bounds up the apocalypse and telekinesis, death on death) like it doesn’t matter - in the grand sense - except for that it had happened to him, and to Scully, and it is happening to Jackson. When Mulder talks, he hardly ever names anyone but the most necessary players. God Module aside - the world he builds is very small. That way, Jackson thinks, there are very few people to save.

“What’s it like?” They’ve stopped at the edge of the pond, which is wide and frozen around the edges. Mulder tosses a stick for the dog, who tears after it. “Hearing her?”

“Clear,” Jackson says. No one has ever asked him this before, and he answers without thinking, all in a rush and a breath. “Kind of sharp. Like really bright lights. But, um, it doesn’t hurt.”

Mulder smiles. “Yeah,” he says. “I remember.”

—

When Ginger gets home just after seven, they are watching re-runs of COPS, awkward and content on opposite ends of the couch. It’s not their episode because Mulder couldn’t find it, but he’s convinced it’ll pop up on one of the tapes and Jackson is alright with waiting. There’s laundry going upstairs, and every so often he can hear the old dryer shift and pound against the wood floors.

For the first time since he showed up at the door, Ginger cries.

—

On the third night, because three is always the magic number, the truest witching hour, optimal number of turns on a dial, he leaves. 

Before he goes, though, he puts a goldfish in a plastic bag on the threshold with a post-it note that says “My name is Domovi” and signs it Jack because no one has ever called him that before. 

Mulder is around back in the garden and Ginger is upstairs even though it’s too light out to sleep. He steals five hundred bucks off them, even though he’s pretty sure he could have asked and even though he knows it won’t last - although maybe that’s the point - and the t-shirt he wore that first night.

And then he is gone.


	2. in summer

This time, he’s out of cash.

Or. Okay. He’s been out of cash since the end of May, and he’d barely made it that long. He’d gone to states he used to forget about on middle school geography exams. Up to Maine and Connecticut, Rhode Island. Then the long drag back down, a little surprised by the physical weight of the air as he moved south, through and past Virginia. A little surprised to find it was meteorological, an early summer humid creep, not metaphysical.

Because it wasn’t like he was guilty. Like he felt a weight. He shouldn’t be guilty. He didn’t ever shut her out. He broadcasted small waves — little scenes like postcard snapshots. He felt something like a twinge from her end of the line as he caught the flashing green eye of the state sign into North Carolina and thought What happened here. She didn’t hear. Or she didn’t answer.

He toes the Southern twin, skirts the line, but never makes it past. For a hot minute, he works as a busboy at a junky little roadside place. All vinyl and formica. He has always liked diners for their persistent light and burnt hot morning coffee smell. Like someone was always just coming awake. But on a Thursday or a Friday a woman with long red hair, twisted and clipped up in the back, comes in tugging a toddler and flashes him a smile. He gives his two minute notice and accidentally steals his apron heading out the back door.

Sometimes he smokes but he doesn’t like the taste.

And now he is out of cash. The second time for everything is supposed to be easier than the first. He circles the house for a day or two before centripetal force, Ginger’s smug little knowing in his head, gravity, fuckin’ road burn-out - all of them conspire together to let him rattle down the drive.

—

“You’re gonna need a different car.”

“You don’t like my car?”

This time Mulder was better prepared, he thinks. For everything. For him. For me. When he’d gotten ready to knock on their door again, he’d thought, What if they don’t - if he doesn’t - but then, he hadn’t even had to. They were out on the porch in squeaky metal chairs, watching the almost-summer sun drag the tall grass for light and bodies. He’d uncurled his hand at his side. Mulder had said, Hey stranger. They’d both smiled. Ginger must have told him flat out, this time.

“That car is a piece of shit, Jack.”

Jack. He wasn’t sure if he’d like it. He likes it.

“Mulder.”

There are only two chairs on the porch. Both of them had stood to offer him theirs and Mulder had shot Ginger a look. It’s not that she’s that pregnant, but she’s definitely not not pregnant. He’d thought it would seem weirder than it does. Her hair is longer, curls up at the bottom. She’d said How are you and he’d shrugged, her hand hovering around his face, a warm shift of air.

He’s settled down with his spine against the porch rail. The wood of the deck is worn in and hoarding heat from the day. He runs his hand against it, looking mindlessly for splinters. Waiting for a catch and hold.

“What? Scully, he’s taller than me. I’m not gonna -” She flashes her eyes at her stomach, and he rolls his eyes, patting her wrist. “You’re carrying the kid. She’s with you all the time. She’s gonna come out swearing like a sailor with no help from me.”

Jackson stretches his legs out in front of him. The porch is too wide for him to be able to touch the far wall. He rolls his ankle and the wood groans. “You know it’s a girl?”

“You know it’s a girl?”

He taps his temple, tilts his head to the side. Mulder nods a little, grinning. “No shit.”

“Mulder.”

When Jackson looks up Ginger’s eyes are closed, but she is smiling, smiling.

—

Since North Carolina, he’s been trying to see how far back he can get when he dials in to her. If she’s not actively thinking about something he wants to see, it’s hard. Harder than it used to be, maybe, like her awareness of him made her a little further out of range. The last thing he could get at was a little nuclear flash of bright light, another red-haired woman, a hospital chair. He wants to know her without asking, because he feels it gives him some stake in this, something to bargain with. Out on the road, he’d gotten consistently worse at Poker, losing cash like he kept it in pockets with holes, but he’d learned a little bit about bluffing, the basics of how to hold stacked cards.

If he could understand her, him, them, without speaking, he probably wouldn’t have to come back here again.

That night, they eat Chinese delivery outside until it gets too cold. The fact that anywhere delivers out here in the first place sets Jack oddly on edge, like access was granted easier than he’d anticipated, but the food is good and they don’t ask him too many questions. When all the light has strained out of the sky and field, Ginger looks over at him for a long time.

“You’ll stay?”

He has to look away, feeling a flutter of something that seems obscure, undesignated. “Tonight, yeah. If that’s okay.”

“If it’s okay.” Mulder scoffs a laugh, shakes his head. It is not unkind.

Ginger makes moves for him to follow her inside, tucking a smile somewhere she thinks he can’t see. With an uncomfortable hesitance, a grace that’s like first-day nerves, she lights their way upstairs instead of to the living room couch. Looking out fast around the kitchen before he follows, the glint of the fish tank - now fit snugly into a corner of the kitchen counter - catches his eye. In the refraction of light against the glass, he thinks he can see Domovoi making shadow plays. Recognizing something here is a little reverential, makes him want to stay. Makes him want to leave.

Upstairs it’s dark. Ginger’s voice is hushed, like there are bodies at rest here, ad infinitum. She points out the bathroom, the master bedroom, and then she opens another door.

The room is small, brighter than the landing. There’s a full bed against one wall and flat cardboard box leaning against the other. Ginger is pressing her hands together. He gets the sense she wants to say something but isn’t sure what it would be.

He dials in for just a second, like a reflex. She’s thinking about an older woman, shorter, grey hair, standing in this room. She is thinking the words for children. He doesn’t think it hurts her. He doesn’t know how it makes him feel.

“Better than the couch,” she says.

He thinks what she’d wanted to say was a question, but she’s looking up at him with a hesitance that makes him feel like biting down hard on his own tongue.

He says, “Yeah, yeah. Thank you. This is great.”

He sits down hard on the bed, so he doesn’t have to be fucking taller than her, so she doesn’t have to look up at him like he’s going to grant her something. He rarely thinks this, can’t think of any teenager who does, but sometimes, between being shot at and busting fucking heads and predicting the end of the world and handling whatever Ginger and Mulder seem to want to give or need to be given and wondering if maybe he wasn’t born so much as made he thinks, I am only seventeen. The adverb feels like begging for mercy.

When Ginger leaves the room she strokes a hand over his head without asking first, and he feels that same little flutter as before. He thinks probably it is hers.

If he could understand everything, he could probably just let the world snap him up in its jaws and crack down and it wouldn’t matter. Because at least he would know.

He hears her go back outside, where Mulder has yet to come in. He is too tired to try to make out words, but he listens to the sound. He is so used to hearing nothing now. In Maine, he had been woken up in the back of the car late at night, parked out in the middle of a field, by the immeasurable quiet. Here, their voices outside remind him of summer crickets, of highway blanket noise, of being eight and his parents watching old Sopranos re-runs downstairs.

He sleeps to the thrum of not-silence.

—

The car is an automatic, which was all he really looked for in the cars he jacked or stole out of Motel 6 lots. It was not really a color. The front fender was dented so sharply inwards it looked like the thing was smiling.

Mulder kicks the front wheel. “How are you expecting to outrun shadowy government figures and both of your girlfriends…. in this?”

Jackson looks sharply at him, trying to determine if he’s joking, then laughs when he realizes it’s funny either way, Mulder joins him. The dog comes tearing off the porch like he’s afraid he’s missing out on a comedy special and yaps at their feet.

He’s been here two days. Both of them claim to work, teaching somewhere in the city, but he hasn’t been alone since coming here. He thinks they all get the sense that this day, the third day, is some determining factor, like they’re living on nursery rhyme time.

Mulder claims they’re going to get him a new car. Jackson is skeptical - he wonders at the logic of handing a runner a pair of shoes, leaving the killer a gun - but Mulder, inexplicably, drives a fucking mustang. So he opts to wait it out. Today is supposedly the day.

“Go tell your mother we’ll be back in a couple hours, will you?” Mulder says.

His mother. For a second, Jackson roots down into the tall grass of the endless yard, staring at the fixed horizon point of the long driveway. His mother, who wore long, soft dresses when he was very small, the kind he could grip in his fist as he crawled up into her lap. His mother, who baked burnt cookies and planted gardens and who sang about oats and peas and barley, even in the suburbs.

His Mother, Ginger, who had cold hands and sharp eyes. Who let Mulder garden and certainly did not sing.

“I just meant - “ He’s been standing here too long. Mulder is looking at him, guilty and far off.

“No, I got it. I’ll be right back.”

He pulls up roots to jog back to the house and shakes off his mothers’ hands.

—

The used car lot is flat and wide and a squat man in suspenders, of all things, asks, “Is this your son’s first car?” and Mulder looks at him for a long minute and then grins and says, “Yeah, we think he’s really earned it.” And Jackson snorts, then chokes on laughter. Mulder bites his lip, still smiling.

Suspenders nods amicably. Mulder claps him on the back, not hard, and it is the first time he’s really touched him since the motel.

They look at blue cars, red. Mulder squints at a decent looking one and says, “I don’t know — were your grades really this good last semester?” Eventually, Suspenders just lets them be, wandering around the lot, amusing themselves, as the sun starts to track in the sky.

And the pantomime of it is fun in a spectacular, cheap sideshow kind of way. Mulder is wry and entertaining and Jackson laughs in part because the question “Are you going to be driving this to prom?” is fucking absurd when this is his life. Laughs in part because.

Well.

Later. In the car, which is blue and fine except its manual, Mulder is swearing up and down he’ll teach him how to drive it and stalling them at every other intersection.

“Once you learn, you never forget,” he says, “it’s like riding a bicycle.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. Mulder shakes his head.

“Don’t do that. I’ve spent half my life giving in,” he points at his eyebrow, “to that.” He’s frowning but his eyes are bright. “You probably came into existence because of that fucking eyebrow thing.”

The car stalls in the middle of the road. The windows are down but the air goes still. Mulder says, “Fuck, fuck.” And Jackson thinks it is not about the car, not really.

He wants to ask if he knows, but for some reason he feels Mulder is less guilty in this than he is complicit. It is not only because he just got him a slightly improved car.

It is Ginger, who cried in that morgue and who let him go at the docks and who always seemed to be asking him questions even though she could live in his head if she wanted - it is Ginger who he wants to tell him.

Instead, Jackson says, “Probably.”

And the car comes to life again, and Mulder says nothing. And he thinks he understands why everything was so fucking funny.

The rest of the car ride is quiet and slow. Outside, Virgina seems to shrug and stumble on summer. The heat clusters and the sky drops. Probably.

—

When they get home, Mulder says something about checking on the garden, walking the dog. Jack snaps the door handle back so hard getting out of the car he thinks it might break.

He makes it upstairs before he throws up.

—

And after dinner, which is quietquietquiet, when it is almost good and properly dark, he watches Ginger as she cleans a plate, pours a glass of water, makes tea. He thinks she must know, even as she’s doing all these things, she must know, and he wonders how she can know and live on the knowledge and act with it somewhere in her and not fucking die or explode. Upstairs, earlier, he decided if he can’t find it, when he dials-in, he’s going to make her say it.

Mulder says he’s going for a run, looks like he can’t wait to be out of the room.

Ginger says ok, kisses him without fully turning away from the counter.

Jack says, when he is out of the house, “So. Who’s the father?”

She looks at her stomach, laughs a little in the back of her throat like she thinks he’s joking. He shakes his head sharply.

“No,” he says. “Who’s the father.”

He doesn’t say my. He isn’t sure he wants to possess this. He just wants to know.

Ginger pulls away from him. She doesn’t move, but her eyes seem to watch him at a safer distance, like the hard twist of a microscope in the wrong direction. He is reminded of her in that COPS episode, which he eventually found three weeks ago, a late night re-run outside Raleigh. Her hard, elevated stare. The angry set of her mouth. Her hands on the butt of her weapon, instinctive. A precaution, a warning.

She says, “Jackson.”

“What did that smoking fucker - the guy with all the cigarettes - what did he mean when he said he created me.”

“I’m not - “ She looks down at the table, at the fish tank, at the hard still line of her hand. He feels bad but not in the way that means guilty.

“You don’t think I have a right to know?”

“No one,” she hisses, her head snapping up. “No one has a right to any truth. No matter how personal, or private, or necessary. There is nothing that grants you that. If I have learned one thing in fifty fucking years, it’s been that.”

He blinks once, something like small awe washing over him. She hadn’t moved, still, but he felt pressed up against a counter. He watches as the tension goes abruptly out of the hard little lines of her shoulders and hands. She presses her fingers against the table top.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “You didn’t deserve that.”

He loves to think the explicit things she does not ever say. Here, she does not tell him she didn’t mean it. He might like that about her - her ability to apologize without a conceding guilt or parsing truths. He might like that about her, if he wasn’t making the glasses on all the shelves shake with the force of a barely restrained something that he can’t identify but knows to pull against.

She’s still talking. “Of course you have a right to know, it’s just that I’m not ready to think about - with the - “

If she notices the sound now of glasses tapping like wind chimes, of the obscure and tightening little circles Domovoi keeps making in the tank, of the way the panes in the windows groan, she doesn’t show it. Her fingers trace the grain of the table, not looking at him. Whether it is ignorance or blind trust, he hates her for it, for a hot moment, quick and child-hurt, paper-cut pain.

“What if I am?”

“What?”

“What if I’m ready to think about it.”

It’s something in his voice that does it. She stills her fingers, looks up at him a little wide-eyed. Gone is the sharp, sleek Ginger of the fucking re-runs, the hissing thing from a few moments ago. Last time he was here, he’d thought that she looked like no one’s mother. Now, she brings her hand up from the table to press against her stomach, and he thinks that is the only thing she looks like. Someone’s mother.

And she is afraid.

Someone’s mother. Just maybe not his.

“William.” Her voice is very low. Low like it had been on the docks that night, when he could hear her above him and in his head, coming in snatches through underwater pressure, absence of light. He was never our son. He wonders if even Mulder knows. Wonders if he hates her too, just a little.

“Listen,” she says. Her hand stays on her stomach. She does not reach for him.

The flutter in the back of his head is a thudding thing, somehow dull and sharp, low and piercing all at once. Behind him a glass falls, then another, another. Ginger’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t leave.

“I don’t know,” she’s saying now, very quiet. “William, I don’t know who - but it doesn’t - “

She’s a liar. If she has nothing else, she has knowledge. She is supposed to be the one keeping secrets; she is supposed to be the one holding all the cards. Liar. Liar.

“My name is not fucking William!”

Beside her, the fish-tank cracks then shatters. Water comes spilling out, pouring over the edge of the flat surface in a waterfall cut. The sound of it rushes. There is glass on the floor. He sees it sparkle in Ginger’s hair as she clutches at her head, suddenly, gasping. And Jackson, William, who the fuckever he is, dials in almost without meaning to. The sound in the kitchen is of breaking. A window shatters. He feels hot and good. Motherless. Ginger on her knees in a broken space of his own making.

It’s easy, suddenly, to split her open. He turns the volume up. He finds things he’d wanted from her, and things he hadn’t, and as he takes them in he sends them back just as fast. Makes her see it. Himself as a baby, a retreating image in a stranger’s arms, Mulder in a hospital bed, a North Carolina grave, a little girl’s sweetheart face against a white sheet. A smoke filled room. Blood in a child’s crib. Ginger cries out, wordless. She feels far from him again, and he is glad.

The front door comes open with a reverberating slam. “Scully?”

The kitchen goes abruptly silent around them. He’s not even aware he’s stopped whatever it was he was doing until it’s done. It feels a little outside of him. Like the room had made its own noise, broken its own glasses and shelves in a twinge of poltergeist mania. Like the home haunted itself.

Ginger is quiet, still kneeling, head bowed. Anger is familiar. Fear is familiar, but the sudden shift between the two leaves him sick, vision blurred, shaking. He hears Mulder but doesn’t really see him, doesn’t really see anything except Domovoi, little stupid fish, washed before his feet in the sudden fish-tank tide. He is red brown in the light. Gutted. Impaled on a sliver of shimmering glass. He takes fitful gasps of unfamiliar air.

Domovoi dies in a heart-beat second.

Jackson runs.

—

Later, later. It is still dark. He just has to check.

When he dials in, cautiously — he is not far out of range, he has no car that he can drive, he didn’t know where to go, it is after midnight on the third day — he can still get her channel. Christ. Thank God.

He sees himself again but not moving away this time. He is very, very small, in the stupidest fucking hat. And he can hear her through years. There are no words, not that he can make out, just his rosy baby face, coming in and out of focus, and a sound like a thrum, like voices on a porch after sunset. He is hearing her in a memory. It takes long minutes for him to realize he’s no longer dialing in. To realize that whatever this is, it is his.

He thinks — It seems so improbable, but he listens, remembers, in snatches.

He thinks she is singing.


End file.
